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Russian spies are “on a mission to wreak havoc in the UK . . .” Iran is fomenting a deadly plot against Britain at “unprecedented speed and scale”, the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence has warned.
MI5 director-general Ken McCollum said on Tuesday that cases of espionage against the UK from other states had halved over the past year and that the range of threats facing Britain was “the most complex and interconnected”. . . We have seen it.”
He said the number of offensive state actions investigated by MI5 had ‘increased’ by 48% in the past 12 months, and that MI5 had responded to 20 potentially lethal Iranian-backed plots since January 2022.
“MI5 has a truly enormous job,” McCallum said in his annual threat assessment. He added that alongside counter-terrorism work, which has continued at a more or less steady level over the past five years, MI5 must tackle “state-sponsored plots of assassination and destruction against the backdrop of major wars in Europe”.
McCallum said MI5 had so far not seen increasing conflict in the Middle East directly leading to an increase in terrorist incidents in the UK.
“We are very conscious of the risk that events in the Middle East could trigger terrorist acts in the UK.” But “so far, we have not seen this translate into terrorist violence on a large scale,” he said.
Nonetheless, he warned that radicalization resulting from recent events in the Middle East was “a slow process” and added that established groups such as the Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda had “reinvigorated their efforts to export terrorism.”
McCallum said the return of these groups is “the terrorist trend I’m most concerned about.” More than a third of MI5’s priority investigations in the past month have involved foreign terrorist groups.
Another development is that one in eight terrorists currently under investigation in the UK are minors recruited online. MI5 has seen a “triple increase” in its investigations of under-18s over far-right terrorism over the past three years, with propaganda “skewed heavily towards young people, demonstrating an astute understanding of online culture”.
However, it is the threat to the country, particularly from Russia, that has seen the biggest increase. Britain’s decision to expel 750 Russian diplomats “made a huge dent” in the Kremlin’s ability to inflict damage on the West because “the vast majority” of them were “spies”.
Britain and its Western allies denying diplomatic visas to new Russian agents is “not glamorous, but it works,” he added.
The expulsion forced Russian spies, such as those in the GRU military intelligence branch, to use proxies, including civilian intelligence agents and criminals.
McCallum said this reduced the general professionalism of Russia’s spy services and increased MI5’s “subversive options” because its agents do not enjoy diplomatic immunity.
Nonetheless, Britain’s leading role in supporting Ukraine means we loom large in the feverish imagination of the Putin regime, he said, adding that we should expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home.
“The GRU in particular is on an ongoing mission to wreak havoc on the streets of the UK and Europe. . . Arson, sabotage and . . . “It is a dangerous behavior that is becoming increasingly reckless,” he said.
Iran has also stepped up its recruitment of criminals – from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks – to act as proxies for Tehran’s espionage operations, which mainly target dissidents in the UK.
McCallum said that since January 2022, “we have seen one conspiracy after another in the UK at an unprecedented pace and scale.”
He explained that counterintelligence work to detect criminals recruited online by adversaries such as Russia or Iran is similar to detecting would-be terrorists recruited online by foreign radicals.
“This is a familiar challenge,” he said. “We will continue to look for them.”
Still, the growing threats facing the UK, including tackling Chinese technology theft and high-level espionage, mean “things are absolutely stretched to the limit,” McCallum said.
MI5 now had to make decisions about how to prioritize its finite resources, which he said were “more difficult than I can remember in my career”. It also meant “lower standards have to be raised.” This was an implicit warning that some potential threats might not be investigated.
“You can’t always draw the right conclusions from small clues,” McCallum said.
